Roundtable: Spies, Prisoners, and Aristocrats: Notes and New Discoveries from the Elizabethan Catholic Underground

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Editing Renaissance manuscript biographical texts can raise as many questions as answers. Given ample time in the archives and the right research team, the study of life writing can also shed considerable new light on previously dim aspects of the historical record. Discussants will address a series of “Eureka!” moments from several years’ work on an anonymous Jesuit biography of the leading Elizabethan Catholic aristocrats Philip (1557–95) and Anne Howard (1557–1630), the Earl and Countess of Arundel. Topics include: (1) the identification of the author Richard Blount, SJ, the first Provincial Superior of England, Wales, and the English Jesuit foundations in the Spanish Netherlands); (2) a direct link in the manuscript to Solomon Aldred, an anti-Catholic spy active in northern France and the Spanish Netherlands; (3) an untranslated contemporary biography of the Earl printed in 16th-century Spain; and (4) the attribution of a heretofore unacknowledged contemporary portrait of the Countess.

Sub Unit

• Associate Organization / Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe

Organizer

• Earle A. Havens, Johns Hopkins University

Chair

• Earle A. Havens, Johns Hopkins University

Discussants

• Robert S. Miola, Loyola University Maryland

• Susannah Brietz Monta, University of Notre Dame

• Elizabeth Patton, Johns Hopkins University

• Kelsey Champagne, Yale University